Qualcomm's 2015 Snapdragon Chips Promise Lightning-Fast Phones

Qualcomm has just revealed the specifications for its 2015 mobile chips. If you thought this year’s offering sounded good, you are in for a massive treat when you read about these newer slabs of silicon.

The two new Snapdragon chips, known as the 810 and 808, are both 64-bit, and billed as high performance hardware designed for flagship Android devices. They aren’t joking.

Both chips, made using 20 nanometre production techniques, will be smaller, lighter and more power efficient than this year’s offering. But the octa-core 810 is the one you really care about: it will sport four Cortex-A57 cores for power-intensive tasks, along with four lower-power Cortex-A53 cores for other times, to keep power consumption down. The chip will support 4K displays, LPDDR4 RAM — that’s faster and more efficient than the current LPDDR3 standard — as well as packing voice activation and dual Image Signal Processors for better imaging. Phew.

In terms of the GPU, the on-board Adreno 430 is supposed to be 30 per cent faster than the current 420, while Cat 6 LTE-Advanced is baked right into the chip. Finally, there’s a two-stream multi-user MIMO, which, in simple terms, means your Wi-Fi connection will be way faster, too. As for the 808, it will feature just six cores — two A57 and four A53 — and support 2K displays. Its Adreno 418 GPU will be 20 per cent faster than the current Adreno 330.

All told, that’s a lot of features to squeeze into a pair of chips. If Qualcomm delivers on its promises, the phones of 2015 should melt our faces off. We can’t wait. [Engadget]